Mark D. Gross

Ryo Suzuki, Hooman Hedayati, Clement Zheng et al.

RoomShift is a room-scale dynamic haptic environment for virtual reality, using a small swarm of robots that can move furniture. RoomShift consists of nine shape-changing robots: Roombas with mechanical scissor lifts. These robots drive beneath a piece of furniture to lift, move and place it. By augmenting virtual scenes with physical objects, users can sit on, lean against, place and otherwise interact with furniture with their whole body; just as in the real world. When the virtual scene changes or users navigate within it, the swarm of robots dynamically reconfigures the physical environment to match the virtual content. We describe the hardware and software implementation, applications in virtual tours and architectural design and interaction techniques.

Ryo Suzuki, Ryosuke Nakayama, Dan Liu et al.

Large-scale shape-changing interfaces have great potential, but creating such systems requires substantial time, cost, space, and efforts, which hinders the research community to explore interactions beyond the scale of human hands. We introduce modular inflatable actuators as building blocks for prototyping room-scale shape-changing interfaces. Each actuator can change its height from 15cm to 150cm, actuated and controlled by air pressure. Each unit is low-cost (8 USD), lightweight (10 kg), compact (15 cm), and robust, making it well-suited for prototyping room-scale shape transformations. Moreover, our modular and reconfigurable design allows researchers and designers to quickly construct different geometries and to explore various applications. This paper contributes to the design and implementation of highly extendable inflatable actuators, and demonstrates a range of scenarios that can leverage this modular building block.

Ryo Suzuki, Clement Zheng, Yasuaki Kakehi et al.

We introduce shape-changing swarm robots. A swarm of self-transformable robots can both individually and collectively change their configuration to display information, actuate objects, act as tangible controllers, visualize data, and provide physical affordances. ShapeBots is a concept prototype of shape-changing swarm robots. Each robot can change its shape by leveraging small linear actuators that are thin (2.5 cm) and highly extendable (up to 20cm) in both horizontal and vertical directions. The modular design of each actuator enables various shapes and geometries of self-transformation. We illustrate potential application scenarios and discuss how this type of interface opens up possibilities for the future of ubiquitous and distributed shape-changing interfaces.

Ryo Suzuki, Koji Yatani, Mark D. Gross et al.

This paper presents Tabby, an interactive and explorable design tool for 3D printing textures. Tabby allows texture design with direct manipulation in the following workflow: 1) select a target surface, 2) sketch and manipulate a texture with 2D drawings, and then 3) generate 3D printing textures onto an arbitrary curved surface. To enable efficient texture creation, Tabby leverages an auto-completion approach which automates the tedious, repetitive process of applying texture, while allowing flexible customization. Our user evaluation study with seven participants confirms that Tabby can effectively support the design exploration of different patterns for both novice and experienced users.

Ryo Suzuki, Abigale Stangl, Mark D. Gross et al.

For people with visual impairments, tactile graphics are an important means to learn and explore information. However, raised line tactile graphics created with traditional materials such as embossing are static. While available refreshable displays can dynamically change the content, they are still too expensive for many users, and are limited in size. These factors limit wide-spread adoption and the representation of large graphics or data sets. In this paper, we present FluxMaker, an inexpensive scalable system that renders dynamic information on top of static tactile graphics with movable tactile markers. These dynamic tactile markers can be easily reconfigured and used to annotate static raised line tactile graphics, including maps, graphs, and diagrams. We developed a hardware prototype that actuates magnetic tactile markers driven by low-cost and scalable electromagnetic coil arrays, which can be fabricated with standard printed circuit board manufacturing. We evaluate our prototype with six participants with visual impairments and found positive results across four application areas: location finding or navigating on tactile maps, data analysis, and physicalization, feature identification for tactile graphics, and drawing support. The user study confirms advantages in application domains such as education and data exploration.

Ryo Suzuki, Tom Yeh, Koji Yatani et al.

Texture is an essential property of physical objects that affects aesthetics, usability, and functionality. However, designing and applying textures to 3D objects with existing tools remains difficult and time-consuming; it requires proficient 3D modeling skills. To address this, we investigated an auto-completion approach for efficient texture creation that automates the tedious, repetitive process of applying texture while allowing flexible customization. We developed techniques for users to select a target surface, sketch and manipulate a texture with 2D drawings, and then generate 3D printable textures onto an arbitrary curved surface. In a controlled experiment our tool sped texture creation by 80% over conventional tools, a performance gain that is higher with more complex target surfaces. This result confirms that auto-completion is powerful for creating 3D textures.